James Andow

In the past few years there has been a turn towards evaluating the empirical foundation of epistemic contextualism using formal (rather than armchair) experimental methods. By-and-large, the results of these experiments have not supported the original motivation for epistemic contextualism. That is partly because experiments have only uncovered effects of changing context on knowledge ascriptions in limited experimental circumstances (when contrast is present, for example), and partly because existing experiments have not been designed to distinguish between contextualism and one of its main competing theories, subject-sensitive invariantism. In this paper, we discuss how a particular, “third-person”, experimental design is needed to provide evidence that would support contextualism over subject-sensitive invariantism. In spite of the theoretical significance of third-person knowledge ascriptions for debates surrounding contextualism, no formal experiments evaluating such ascriptions that assess contextualist claims have previously been conducted. In this paper, we conduct an experiment specifically designed to examine that central gap in contextualism’s empirical foundation. The results of our experiment provide crucial support for epistemic contextualism over subject-sensitive invariantism.

The word ‘intuition’ is used frequently both in philosophy and in discussions about philosophical methods. It has been argued that this intuition-talk makes no (clear) semantic contribution and that intuition-talk is thus a bad habit that ought to be abandoned. I urge caution in making this inference. There are many pragmatic roles intuition-talk might play. Moreover, according to one plausible story (for which there is some empirical support), there is reason to think intuition-talk is actually a good habit for philosophers to have.

Various studies show moral intuitions to be susceptible to framing effects. Many have argued that this susceptibility is a sign of unreliability and that this poses a methodological challenge for moral philosophy. Recently, doubt has been cast on this idea. It has been argued that extant evidence of framing effects does not show that moral intuitions have a unreliability problem. I argue that, even if the extant evidence suggests that moral intuitions are fairly stable with respect to what intuitions we have, the effect of framing on the strength of those intuitions still needs to be taken into account. I argue that this by itself poses a methodological challenge for moral philosophy.

There is something peculiar about aesthetic testimony. It seems more difficult to gain knowledge of aesthetic properties based solely upon testimony than it is in the case of other types of property. In this paper, I argue that we can provide an adequate explanation at the level of the semantics of aesthetic language, without defending any substantive thesis in epistemology or about aesthetic value/judgement. If aesthetic predicates are given a non-invariantist semantics, we can explain the supposed peculiar difficulty with aesthetic testimony.

Recent empirical work on non-philosophers’ intuitions about epistemic normativity reveals patterns that cannot be fully accounted for by direct epistemic consequentialism. On the basis of these results, one might picture participants as “epistemic deontologists.” We present the results of two new experiments that support a more nuanced picture. We examine intuitions about guesses and hypotheses, and about beliefs. Our results suggest a two-factor model of intuitions, wherein both consequentialist and non-consequentialist considerations affect participants’ judgments about epistemic permissibility.

Bernard Molyneux presents some new arguments against descriptive evidentialism about intuitions. Descriptive evidentialism is the thesis that philosophers use intuitions as evidence. Molyneux's arguments are that: (1) the propositions that intuition putatively supports are treated as having a degree and kind of certainty and justification that they could not have got from being intuited; (2) intuitions influence us in ways we cannot explain by supposing we treat them as evidence; and (3) certain strong intuitions that persuade us of their contents are treated as inadmissible in the context of justification. This article presents a partial defence of descriptive evidentialism against these new arguments.

Direct epistemic consequentialism is the idea that X is epistemically permissible iff X maximizes epistemic value. It has received lots of attention in recent years and is widely accepted by philosophers to have counterintuitive implications. There are various reasons one might suspect that the relevant intuitions will not be widely shared among non-philosophers. This paper presents an initial empirical study of ordinary intuitions. The results of two experiments demonstrate that the counterintuitiveness of epistemic consequentialism is more than a philosophers' worry---the folk seem to agree!

Experimental philosophy brings empirical methods to philosophy. These methods are used to probe how people think about philosophically interesting things such as knowledge, morality, freedom, etc. This paper explores the contribution that qualitative methods have to make in this enterprise. I argue that qualitative methods have the potential to make a much greater contribution than they have so far. Along the way, I acknowledge a few types of resistance that proponents of qualitative methods in experimental philosophy might encounter, and provide reasons to think they are ill-founded.

Are philosophers’ intuitions more reliable than philosophical novices’? Are we entitled to assume the superiority of philosophers’ intuitions just as we assume that experts in other domains have more reliable intuitions than novices? Ryberg raises some doubts and his arguments promise to undermine the expertise defence of intuition-use in philosophy once and for all. In this paper, I raise a number of objections to these arguments. I argue that philosophers receive sufficient feedback about the quality of their intuitions and that philosophers’ experience in philosophy plausibly affects their intuitions. Consequently, the type of argument Ryberg offers fails to undermine the expertise defence of intuition-use in philosophy.

Mallon, Machery, Nichols and Stich (Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 79: 332–356, 2009) argue that the use of intuitions in the philosophy of reference is problematic as recent studies show intuitions about reference vary both within and between cultures. I use some ideas from the recent literature on disagreement and truth relativism to shed light on the debate concerning the appropriate reaction to these studies. Mallon et al. argue that variation is problematic because if one tries to use intuitions which vary to find the correct theory of reference one will end up endorsing an absurd position: referential pluralism. I argue that there is hope for intuition-based philosophy of reference. One can avoid endorsing referential pluralism (as Mallon et al. understand it). Furthermore, referential pluralism may not be so absurd after all.

Do philosophers use intuitions? Should philosophers use intuitions? Can philosophical methods (where intuitions are concerned) be improved upon? In order to answer these questions we need to have some idea of how we should go about answering them. I defend a way of going about methodology of intuitions: a metamethodology. I claim the following: (i) we should approach methodological questions about intuitions with a thin conception of intuitions in mind; (ii) we should carve intuitions finely; and, (iii) we should carve to a grain to which we are sensitive in our everyday philosophising. The reason is that, unless we do so, we don’t get what we want from philosophical methodology. I argue that what we want is information that will aid us in formulating practical advice concerning how to do philosophy responsibly/well/better.

The word “intuition” is one frequently used in philosophy. It is often assumed that the way in which philosophers use the word, and others like it, is very distinctive. This claim has been subjected to little empirical scrutiny, however. This article presents the first steps in a qualitative analysis of the use of intuition talk in the academy. It presents the findings of two preliminary empirical studies. The first study examines the use of intuition talk in spoken academic English. The second examines the use of intuition talk in written academic English. It considers what these studies tell us about the distinctiveness of philosophical language and methods and considers some implications for evaluative and ameliorative methodology.

Recent decades have seen a surge in interest in metaphilosophy. In particular there has been an interest in philosophical methodology. Various questions have been asked about philosophical methods. Are our methods any good? Can we improve upon them? Prior to such evaluative and ameliorative concerns, however, is the matter of what methods philosophers actually use. Worryingly, our understanding of philosophical methodology is impoverished in various respects. This article considers one particular respect in which we seem to be missing an important part of the picture. While it is a received wisdom that the word “intuition” has exploded across analytic philosophy in recent decades, the article presents evidence that the explosion is apparent across a broad swathe of academia (and perhaps beyond). It notes various implications for current methodological debates about the role of intuitions in philosophy.

In the past decade, a number of empirical researchers have suggested that laypeople have compatibilist intuitions. In a recent paper, Feltz and Millan (2015) have challenged this conclusion by claiming that most laypeople are only compatibilists in appearance and are in fact willing to attribute free will to people no matter what. As evidence for this claim, they have shown that an important proportion of laypeople still attribute free will to agents in fatalistic universes. In this paper, we first argue that Feltz and Millan’s error-theory rests on a conceptual confusion: it is perfectly acceptable for a certain brand of compatibilist to judge free will and fatalism to be compatible, as long as fatalism does not prevent agents from being the source of their actions. We then present the results of two studies showing that laypeople’s intuitions are best understood as following a certain brand of source compatibilism rather than a “free-will-no-matter-what” strategy.

A reorientation is needed in methodological debate about the role of intuitions in philosophy. Methodological debate has lost sight of the reason why it makes sense to focus on questions about intuitions when thinking about the methods or epistemology of philosophy. The problem is an approach to methodology which gives a near exclusive focus to questions about some evidential role that intuitions may or may not play in philosophers' arguments. A new approach is needed. Approaching methodological questions about the role of intuitions in philosophy with an abductive model of philosophical enquiry in mind will help ensure the debate doesn't lose sight of what motivates the debate.

Various studies have reported that moral intuitions about the permissibility of acts are subject to framing effects. This paper reports the results of a series of experiments which further examine the susceptibility of moral intuitions to framing effects. The main aim was to test recent speculation that intuitions about the moral relevance of certain properties of cases might be relatively resistent to framing effects. If correct, this would provide a certain type of moral intuitionist with the resources to resist challenges to the reliability of moral intuitions based on such framing effects. And, fortunately for such intuitionists, although the results can’t be used to mount a strident defence of intuitionism, the results do serve to shift the burden of proof onto those who would claim that intuitions about moral relevance are problematically sensitive to framing effects.

In recent decades, intuitions' role in philosophy has been hotly debated. Many claim intuitions play an important role. Others, some armed with data, challenge the use of intuitions. This thesis reflects on this debate and advances the debate in two main ways. Having a clear understanding of the challenge which intuition-use in philosophy faces is important. Part I focuses on this. Chapters 1-2 introduce the topic of intuitions, motivate the methodological study of intuitions, and present the historical background to recent empirical challenges to intuition-use. Chapters 3-5 concern the contemporary challenge. I present the empirical evidence the challenge uses, present what I argue to be the strongest version of the challenge, and defend that challenge against some objections. How one characterises intuitions is incredibly important in philosophical methodology. If we are to properly evaluate philosophical methods vis-a-vis their use of something called intuitions { if we are to assess the empirical challenge { it is important to be clear exactly what we mean by `intuitions'. Part II focuses on this. Chapter 6 argues there is little consensus among philosophers as to what intuitions are and their role in philosophy. Chapter 7 questions whether philosophers have developed an idiolect in which `intuition' has distinctive meaning | as frequently supposed. Chapter 8 points out a common misunderstanding about intuitions in philosophy; using quantitative tools to challenge the idea that an increased use of `intuition' in philosophy is the result of an increased use of intuition. So, the developing picture is one of confusion, without a clear idea of what sense of `intuition' is important. Fortunately, Chapter 9 sets us back on the right track. It sets out a positive programme for evaluative methodology: methodologists should adopt a permissive conception of intuitions and make fine distinctions between different intuitions, so long as we can track those distinctions while philosophising.

Recent debates have examined epistemic conditions on moral responsibility. A central question is whether ignorance of moral norms can excuse wrongdoing in the same way as factual ignorance. Volitionists link the exculpatory potential of moral ignorance to the fulfillment of procedural obligations. Quality of Will theorists add conditions such as inaccessibility of moral truth or high moral difficulty. In two pre-registered experiments (total N = 500), we tested whether procedural obligations, bias in moral evidence, and moral difficulty affect ascriptions of blame for everyday moral transgressions (act blameworthiness) and for moral ignorance about their wrongness (belief blameworthiness). Confirmatory analyses suggested that moral ignorance resulting from biased moral evidence slightly reduced both act and belief blameworthiness, and that the two types of blame were strongly correlated. High moral difficulty was associated with lower act and belief blameworthiness, but this was independent of any exculpatory effect of moral ignorance. Procedural obligations and their interaction with moral evidence did not show consistent effects on either type of blame. An exploratory analysis restricted to participants who had passed the respective manipulation checks suggested a moderate to large exculpatory effect of moral ignorance under fulfilled obligations combined with biased evidence. Yet, only one third of participants passed both manipulation checks for this combination. We interpret our results as suggesting that exculpation via moral ignorance is in principle possible, but many people are reluctant to accept that moral truth can be inaccessible to conscientious agents. We discuss implications for debates about epistemic conditions on moral responsibility.

Holist nonanthropocentric approaches in ethics face the challenge of avoiding the misanthropic sacrifice objection. Those who raise the objection do so on the basis that holist nonanthropocentric ethics imply that it might be permissible to sacrifice individual humans, groups of humans, or even humanity as a whole, for the sake of preserving broader ecological wholes. The misanthropic sacrifice objection is thus relevant to African environmental ethics, where nonanthropocentrism is often de-ve loped through frameworks that are holist or at least relationalist because of how they develop communitarian and vitalist resources (typically but not always in combination). In his recent work on moral status, Munamato Chemhuru emphasizes teleology alongs ide vitalism. I argue this focus on teleology, in combination with vitalism, (a) has some unrecognized promise as a way of avoiding misanthropic sacrifices within a nonanthropocentric African environmental ethics, but (b) nonetheless faces three key challe nges that will need to be met before that promise is fully realized. These challenges concern the ability of hierarchical vitalism to afford both nonanthropocentric protections for nonhuman entities and protections for humans (and their communities), as we ll as an ambiguity at the heart of vitalist teleology.

Various philosophers have recently argued for a descriptive account of philosophical methodology in which philosophers do not use intuitions as evidence. This paper raises and considers an objection to such accounts. The objection is that such accounts render various aspects of philosophical practice inexplicable. The contribution of this paper is to demonstrate that one can provide a satisfactory account of the relevant aspects of philosophical practice without saying that philosophers use intuitions as evidence. One could, for example, maintain that the relevant aspects of philosophical practice serve purely explanatory roles.

Conceptual engineers are in the business of helping us think as we should. Experimental philosophy can be seen as being in the business of describing how we think. One might think there must thus be a gap between any experimental philosophy project and any successful project in conceptual engineering, that conceptual engineering reserves a special role for armchair philosophers. But, a successful project in conceptual engineering might be fully experimental. Conceptual engineering reserves no special role for armchair philosophers.

Previous experimental studies on epistemic contextualism have, for the most part, not been designed to distinguish between contextualism and one of its main competing theories, subject‐sensitive invariantism (SSI). In this paper, we present a “third‐person” experimental design that is needed to provide evidence that would support contextualism over SSI, and we then present our results using this design. Our results not only provide crucial support for contextualism over SSI, but also buck the general trend of failing to detect the kind of contextual effect that the epistemic contextualism relies upon.

Do philosophers use intuitions? Should philosophers use intuitions? Can philosophical methods (where intuitions are concerned) be improved upon? In order to answer these questions we need to have some idea of how we should go about answering them. I defend a way of going about methodology of intuitions: a metamethodology. I claim the following: (i) we should approach methodological questions about intuitions with a thin conception of intuitions in mind; (ii) we should carve intuitions finely; and, (iii) we should carve to a grain to which we are sensitive in our everyday philosophising. The reason is that, unless we do so, we don’t get what we want from philosophical methodology. I argue that what we want is information that will aid us in formulating practical advice concerning how to do philosophy responsibly/well/better.

According to a popular theory in philosophical methodology, there is a widespread misconception among philosophers as to their own methods. This misconception is that philosophers use intuitions as evidence. This is a fascinating theory for various reasons. Some of those reasons pertain to what the theory predicts about what philosophers are teaching their students, and whether the theory puts us on the pathway to pedagogical reform. The current paper doesn’t answer those questions but uses them to demonstrate some hitherto unrecognised fascinating aspects of the idea that there is a widespread misconception among philosophers as to their methods.

Colour relationalism holds that the colours are constituted by relations to subjects. Anti-relationalists have claimed that this view stands in stark contrast to our phenomenally-informed, pre-theoretic intuitions. Is this claim right? Cohen and Nichols’ recent empirical study suggests not, as about half of their participants seemed to be relationalists about colour. Despite Cohen and Nichols’ study, we think that the anti-relationalist’s claim is correct. We explain why there are good reasons to suspect that Cohen and Nichols’ experimental design skewed their results in favour of relationalism. We then run an improved study and find that most of our participants seem to be anti-relationalists. We find some other interesting things too. Our results suggest that the majority of ordinary people find it no less intuitive that colours are objective than that shapes are objective. We also find some evidence that when those with little philosophical training are asked about the colours of objects, their intuitions about colour and shape cases are similar, but when asked about people’s colour ascriptions, their intuitions about colour and shape cases differ.